2 February 2026
When funnels disagree on purpose
A shared funnel name is not a shared journey. Pretending otherwise produces a conversion rate nobody can act on.
Product teams love a single “checkout funnel” tile. Design, meanwhile, shipped Apple Pay on iOS as two taps and left web on a five-field address form. The event names were unified in a heroic taxonomy project. The steps were not. Reporting that overlays them into one staircase will invent a drop-off that is really a different product.
Draw both paths on paper
Before you join tables, sketch the human steps. If iOS skips “delivery method” because it infers a store pickup, that step must not appear as a missing event. Session Graphs for Mixed Clients spends a week on this sketch. Analysts who skip it debug tracking for days.
Report sibling rates, not a blended child
Publish iOS, Android, and web conversion as siblings with a short note on which steps exist. A blended company rate can exist later for the board, labelled as a weighted mix with the weights visible. Hide the weights and you will be asked why a web experiment “hurt mobile.”
If a step is gated by a permission prompt, treat the prompt as a product surface. Funnel notes in Privacy-Aware Funnel Notes show how to write that without turning the pack into a legal memo.